Soap Films as 1D waveguides

Abstract Laser light is injected in a free standing horizontal draining soap film through the glass frame sustaining the film. Two propagation regimes are clearly identified depending on the film thickness. At the beginning of the drainage, the soap film behaves as a multimode-one dimensional optofiuidic waveguide. In particular, we observe that the injected light creates a bottleneck in the film and part of the injected light is refracted leading to whiskers. At the end of the drainage where the film thickness is below 1μm, there is a strong selection among the various possible optical modes in the film, and part of the light is defiected. This leads to a self selection of the mode propagation inside the film.